TSF Book Club
-
I finished the two-parter biography on Sinatra by James Kaplan, supposedly authoritative and critically praised.
The first part “The Voice” (2010) was about 500 pages and detailed his rise to fame, his downward trajectory, and then ended when he won an Academy Award for Best Support Actor in “From Here to Eternity.”
The second part “The Chairman” (2015) is 900 pages and continues with the Greatest Comeback In Show-Biz history until his death.
I’d recommend it for only two reasons: 1) It tells the story chronologically; and 2) it appears to support & confirm everything that Kitty Kelley wrote in her infamous and condemned bio from a couple decades ago.
And there’s the rub. If you want to know about his numerous connections to the mob and how he was scoring hookers for Jack Kennedy and how much of a raving bi-polar psychopathic lunatic Frank Sinatra was, I’d save a thousand pages and go straight to the Kitty Kelley version. It’s not chronological, but all the good dirt is there. Legend!
-
@Mokey Is this writing as good as I think it is? Surely must be a finalist for the Man Booker prize
-
@stockcar86 Lots of women have been having fun with this. The task was to describe themselves the way a male writer would, and male writers always have female characters thinking about their tits in the oddest of ways.
-
@mokey said in TSF Book Club:
@stockcar86 Lots of women have been having fun with this. The task was to describe themselves the way a male writer would, and male writers always
have female charactersthinkingabouttheirtitsin the oddest of ways.That's why.
-
Seems like the Slow, Fat Bastard hasn't been completely sitting on his hands and he's going to have a book out before Christmas - it just won't be the one I'm waiting for.
He's going to be 70 later this year - "Witless is coming"!
-
@chris-b said in TSF Book Club:
Seems like the Slow, Fat Bastard hasn't been completely sitting on his hands and he's going to have a book out before Christmas - it just won't be the one I'm waiting for.
He's going to be 70 later this year - "Witless is coming"!
It'll be another Robert Jordan, hopefully he had copious notes to hand over to his successor!
-
@machpants Having the TV series made and the story basically told is going to provide even less motivation for him to finish.
I'm sure he's got the best of intentions, but I'd say underlying that is that he basically can't be fucked finishing. And it's only going to get harder.
Since he's worth $65 million+ he should just hire a ghost-writing team to do the donkey-work and play around with a bit of editing himself at the end.
-
-
@sammyc said in TSF Book Club:
Recently discovered Sven Hassel, bought 10 of his books off trade me for around $2 each.
Can anyone reccommend any similar stuff? I'm addicted.
I read those in my teen years back in the day. Easy to read, great stories
-
@sammyc said in TSF Book Club:
Recently discovered Sven Hassel, bought 10 of his books off trade me for around $2 each.
Can anyone reccommend any similar stuff? I'm addicted.
The forgotten soldier by Guy Sajer. Similar but more likely to be a true story than Sven Hassels books.. Btw they made a movie of one of his early books which is pretty decent. The legionnaire in particular was well cast.
-
Finally read C.K. Stead's Smiths Dream. Rather good!
Writes well and with effective style, without trying to sound like someone else. Enjoyed some of the Auckland region references, and
Muldoon'sVolkner's rant about "people who think they're too good for NZ wine".Any recommendations from the rest of his work?
-
-
-
@tim said in TSF Book Club:
He took a big shit on The Luminaries, and that was good enough for me.
I had to look this up:
Each of the twelve men who comprise the council in the first chapter of the book is associated with one of the twelve signs of the zodiac. The title of a chapter in which one of these men plays a major role invariably bears that man's sign.
Fire and Blood
